


Revel

by deathwailart



Series: Fiachra Surana [1]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Elves, F/M, Headcanon, Mages, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-14
Updated: 2014-07-14
Packaged: 2018-02-08 21:31:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1956858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Outside the tower, Fiachra Surana is finally free to embrace his magic and what it means to be an Arcane Warrior.</p>
<p>Written for the 30 day drabble challenge: revel</p>
            </blockquote>





	Revel

It's more freedom than he's ever known in all his life. He can't count the Alienage because what sort of life is that for anyone? His memories are hazy but he does remember how his father taught him how to carefully slip a hand into a pocket, to cut a purse, to hide food where he could when it was the three of them in two rooms where one was really just a boarded off corner to give the privy some measure of privacy. The Alienage was keeping your head down, avoiding the humans, muttering quietly. Apparently. He just remembers the pinched look on his mother's face, the way father went so quiet the day they found out he had magic. The Templars came, the biggest men he'd ever seen in their shining armour and long skirts. Mother had screamed with as much fire in her eyes as he'd had in his hands but his father had pulled her away, kissed Fiachra on his brow and smiled.  
  
The Circle was even less freedom. Do this, do that, don't you even dream of doing that. Windows high enough he couldn't see out of them, only rare moments out in the lake until that bloody idiot Anders put an end to that. They'd had to move all the staff drills indoors after that. Sweating in their robes. Being an elf mattered just a little less until the eyes followed him and the hands and the rumours. There was the little group of them, even a girl who looked just like the Tabris girl he'd lived next door to, skin lighter but he'd ended up even paler too but she'd had the same big brown eyes, the same tightly coiled copper curls. There had been so many rumours, about what all those knife-ears were getting up to, whispering in the corners, was it forbidden magic or something much more sordid.  
  
In reality it was sharing whatever they found out about their people in library books. A solemn vow between apprentices of crudely stitched together parchment signed with their names and hidden beneath the chests themselves where the stones had crumbled enough. He's got it with him now. One of the few things he took with him when Duncan left him and he's filled it on the journey since leaving the Circle, a journal of what he's encountered, not strictly elven secrets or bits and pieces but all he plans to teach any other young elven mages should he go back. When he encounters the spirit in the elven ruins he weeps. He feels ancient knowledge sink into him and he cries when he grants that spirit release, when he realises he perhaps knows even more than the Dalish elves he's helping at the time. Despite mutterings he writes it down lest he forget, sniffing and swallowing back tears, his heart fit to burst.  
  
The oldest elven knowledge and he only tells Morrigan because he cannot contain himself, not when she's spoken of her shapeshifting to him. Her smile isn't the usual shy thing (he'd never say that, she'd hex him for it) or the coy curl of a lip but something almost vulnerable and she then wonders how he'd look in a much shorter skirt.  
  
He doesn't lay down his staffs and staves entirely – they're made for that purpose and he's even been learning to carve them himself under Morrigan's guidance although they do have a tendency to get rather sidetrack – but he learns the weight of a dagger and there's something so satisfying about switching between the two, fire and ice and lightning, the flash of the blade and the blood. The way he can get close and be shielded by his armour and feel the Fade crackle about him, like the warriors in the old stories most of their people have forgotten.  
  
He writes it all down, all the drills Zevran and Leliana put him through, the spells Morrigan throws at him or when she takes the form of a wild creature to help him learn his limits, Alistair and Oghren – later Loghain - helping him learn the correct armour.  
  
He chooses Dalish in the end. Wields a Dar'Misaan and a Dar'Misu. Wields knowledge as old as Arlathan and lets it keep him going no matter how dark the road gets.

**Author's Note:**

> I get really emotional thinking about the spirit that teaches the Arcane Warrior specialisation when you play an elf and really, the only way it would've hurt more is if it had been a Dalish mage warden.


End file.
